


Zion No Koeda - Prologue

by Flame of Ishval (Ishval)



Category: Zion no Koeda
Genre: Fusanosuke Inariya, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-08
Updated: 2016-03-05
Packaged: 2017-11-24 03:52:30
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,460
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/630084
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ishval/pseuds/Flame%20of%20Ishval
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>May 1945.</p><p>Elias stands in front of the tall oak doors leading into the Gruppenführer's offices at headquarters, determined to get his revenge as the Third Reich crumbles. The Allied armies are closing in more each day. In the West, the Americans are pushing forward. In the East, the Russians are leaving death and destruction in their wake. Elias takes a deep breath. Behind him in the building rages the chaos of a fleeing army, the sounds of equipment being moved and footsteps echoing through the hallways. Before him, he believes, lies his chance for revenge.</p><p>When he opens the door, he never gets the chance to gloat about his triumph and Germany's end. Instead, he sees the Gruppenführer standing behind his oak desk, facing the large windows beyond, looking into the courtyard where soldiers are burning files. He raises his pistol to his head. As soon as Elias saw his hand move, he rushed across the room with only one thought on his mind - "The bastard can't die before I get my revenge!"</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> In the English translations of Fusanosuke Inariya's "Zion no Koeda" that are making their rounds on the Internet, the German officer is referred to by his rank, Major General, and the Jewish doctor is called by his name, Elijah, just once. Because I'm a stickler for historical accuracy more than a stickler for canon, I've decided to go with the German versions of both the rank and the name, using the SS rank of Gruppenführer for the Major General and the German-Jewish spelling Elias for Elijah.
> 
> The story is a prologue to the first chapter of "Zion no Koeda" and fills in the blanks between the flashback scenes we see of the Major General raising the pistol to his head to commit suicide and the action of the original story where the Major General is at Elijah's mercy in the abandoned house. I'm introducing minor characters in the periphery to move the story along, all of which are mostly referred to by their ranks. German SS ranks are so annoying. For the record, the Rottenführer would be a Corporal in English, and the Schütze a Private.

May 1945.

Elias stood in front of the heavy oak doors that led into the Gruppenführer’s office and hesitated, his hand already on the brass door handle.

Behind him, footsteps of soldiers echoed through the marble halls of headquarters. Men were rushing along the hallways, destroying files, throwing things from windows, and loading important equipment onto trucks. All to make a last mad dash to the west, into the arms of the British and American armies that were coming ever closer, and away from the Russian red army that was leaving death and destruction in its wake.

The smell of burnt paper hung heavy in the air. It was the smell of defeat.

Elias loved it.

He’d come to gloat, of course. After fifteen long years serving as little more than a pet project to the Gruppenführer, he was finally free. Elias couldn’t wait for the moment he would shed the label “honorary Aryan” that had been bestowed on him, a Jew. It was a term the Nazis used to classify part-Jews who’d been found deserving of life, of not being sent to the camps. It was also the title that kept him from belonging to either world. He was no longer a Jew, but neither would he would be a German.

Elias took another deep breath of defeat hanging heavy over headquarters and straightened his shoulders. He would march into the Gruppenführer’s office in triumph to see him suffer the defeat of the country he loved and the movement he believed in. Then, after Elias had had his chance to gloat, he’d ensure the Gruppenführer would get a taste of what it had been like for Elias all these years, being kept like a pet.

Yes, Elias had been allowed to do the things German children did: he walked freely, had ample food, went to school, even attended university to become a doctor. Other Jewish boys, meanwhile, were first banned from schools, then gassed in the camps. But even so, Elias had never been truly free under the Gruppenführer’s watchful eyes, and he was all too aware of the rude stares and whispered remarks of other Germans he came in contact with. They’d known, of course, that he wasn’t one of them and that he never would be. Even now, as a doctor working in a German army hospital, the looks and whispers continued. People knew. Sure, he was a doctor, but to many of the other doctors and to most of the hospital staff, he was still first and foremost a Jew.

Elias’ grip tightened on the door handle and he slowly opened the heavy door. It swung open with surprising ease for its size and weight, revealing behind it the oak desk bathed in the mid-afternoon sunlight falling into the room from tall, curtain-less windows. The Gruppenführer was silhouetted behind his desk, his back to the doorway. He hadn’t heard Elias enter.

Elias was about to step forward and announce himself when the Gruppenführer made a movement and Elias realized he had raised a pistol. The sun briefly caught the barrel as he turned the gun, perfectly silhouetted against the bright sky outside, and placed it gently against his temple, his index finger on the trigger.

Elias’ heart pounded as he leapt across the room, cleared the table, and lunged for the gun. His hand closed around the Gruppenführer’s wrist just as he pulled the trigger, and the limp body slumped backward into Elias’ arms.

Elias felt an immense surge of anger coursing through his body. “You bastard,” he thought. “You fucking bastard. How dare you kill yourself before I can have revenge!”

He lowered the body to the ground and looked down on the Gruppenführer who seemed very small indeed as he lay there lifelessly. But then, Elias thought, he didn’t look dead. The dead, he knew, almost immediately took on a waxy look, like oversized wax statues or movie props. They no longer appeared to be human once they died. The Gruppenführer did not look like this at all, and Elias’ mind began to catch up with the scene before him.

He realized that he saw neither a bullet wound nor very much blood. This meant he’d made it in time: he’d been able to push away the gun just as the Gruppenführer had pulled the trigger. It had been the force of the concussion that had knocked the Gruppenführer unconscious.

Elias bent over the lifeless body, his practiced doctor’s fingers feeling for a pulse first at the carotid artery in the neck, then at the radial artery in the wrist. He felt both. The pulses were fast but regular. A trickle of blood coming from the Gruppenführer’s ear suggested he’d blown his ear drum, and powder burns to the side of his face suggested the firearm going off close to his face, but he seemed to have been spared any more serious injury, though it would remain to be seen whether there was concussion or any injury to the eye.

Elias looked up and saw the bullet hole in the wall high above the fireplace to his left. He gave a sigh of relief. He’d have his revenge after all.

But, one thing at a time. First he’d have to figure out how to move the Gruppenführer to the old house hidden deep in the woods near the Gruppenführer’s former summer residence. This wouldn’t be easy; the German army was fleeing in every direction, and the roads were clogged with civilian refugees from the East. Worse yet, bands of fanatical SS troops and even Hitler Youth boys were roving the countryside, killing “traitors.” They were hanging or gunning down anyone they found without a proper pass or an ID card. As a Jewish doctor moving an unconscious SS-Gruppenführer, Elias could expect certain death if he were caught.

It also occurred to him that avoiding patrols and trying to move against the stream of refugees was only a part of his problems. Keeping the Gruppenführer from being recognized would be, too, if Elias didn’t want to see his prize scooped up by the red army and hung for war crimes.

Right now, however, keeping the Gruppenführer sedated was his primary concern.

Elias wished he had his medical kit, which was inconveniently sitting underneath his desk at the field hospital, three kilometers away. However, being doctor, he always carried some equipment in case he was needed, especially now that bombing raids were a daily occurrence. At the very least he always carried some morphine, which was used to relieve pain and during anesthesia. He’d probably have just enough to keep the Gruppenführer quiet long enough to get him to the field hospital.

A plan began to formulate in Elias’ mind. He would sedate the Gruppenführer and, once at the hospital, dispose of his identification tag, papers, and uniform. Then he would hide him in plain sight: as another wounded soldier in one of the overcrowded wards. It was simple enough.

Elias reached for his morphine kit, opened the small box containing several pre-filled syringes, and placed it on the floor beside the Gruppenführer’s limp arm. He lifted one of the syringes from the kit and carefully injected the morphine into the radial vein at the Gruppenführer’s wrist. That should keep him quiet for a while.

Having slipped the kit back into his coat pocket, Elias ran down the hallway to fetch the Gruppenführer’s orderly, Rottenführer Schmidt, from his office. He found Schmidt hacking away at his typewriter, seemingly unaware of anything going on around him. You couldn’t blame him: between the sporadic gunfire in the distance and the noise in the building, anyone could have missed a gunshot. Even someone not half-deaf, as Schmidt was.

“SCHMIDT!” Elias shouted, which seemed to get the Rottenführer’s attention. “The Gruppenführer just tried to kill himself! Help me get him into the car, I’ll take him to the hospital.”

Schmidt rushed around the desk at once and followed Elias into the office. Together, they were able to carry the Gruppenführer’s limp body down the stairs and out into the gravel courtyard where Elias’ car was parked. Being a military doctor, he had access to this vehicle, a gray Opel Olympia that had seen better days, whenever it wasn’t in use by anyone else.

The driver, a very short, easily annoyed SS-Schütze by the name of Rothgerber, was kicking at pebbles on the ground and smoking those awful Russian cigarettes he’d acquired a taste for on the Russian front, when he saw them approach. He put the cigarette out between his fingers and put it into his pocket. Everything was in short supply these days, even bad cigarettes. He opened the passenger-side door, which creaked in protest, and helped them put the Gruppenführer into the back seat.

“There’s no need to send any of his things, Schmidt,” Elias said to the orderly. “It doesn’t look like he’ll stay long.” To himself he thought, “and it doesn’t look like his office will still be here in a few days, anyway. Once the Russians overrun it, there won’t be much left of it or of anyone caught nearby.” He said out loud, “We’ll both see you soon.” Schmidt shrugged. Me may have been half-deaf and only a lowly clerk, but he was no idiot and he knew as well as Elias that he would probably be trying to make his way to American lines in a few days, rather than face the Russians.


	2. Chapter 2

Elias walked down the tiled hospital hallway to reach the ward where he was keeping the Gruppenführer among other wounded soldiers until he could figure out a way to move him to the abandoned cottage in the mountains.

Elias wore his doctor’s coat, a grungy garment that had once been new, white, and starched, but that had fallen victim to supply shortages as much as anything else. The entire hospital was in a state of neglect and there was little anyone could do about it. They were short on everything from medications to bandages to basic cleaning supplies.

The entire hospital had taken on a smell between gangrene and body odor, coppery with drying blood and damp with mildew. Wards were overcrowded. So much so that beds were only inches apart and every available bed and space had been filled with wounded. Even gurneys in the hallways served as a long-term solution for some patients.

Evacuation of the wounded, which had begun a few days earlier, had ceased when the army decided it could spare no more trucks. The few vehicles that remained were to be used for able-bodied personnel willing to squeeze in like sardines on their flight. For all intents and purposes, the hospital and its remaining occupants had been abandoned. What was left were a few doctors, a handful of orderlies and clerks, and a lot of patients who were either too ill or too severely wounded to make their way west.

Elias didn’t care about the wounded soldiers or the staff. He was too preoccupied with finding some way to move the Gruppenführer, which seemed more impossible with each passing day. For now, the best he could do was keeping him sedated and bandaged, so he wouldn’t be recognized, and hope for the best.

Elias had disposed of the Gruppenführer’s things; his uniform, papers, even his ID tags had been burnt in the incinerator in the hospital basement. It wasn’t foolproof and he expected the identity disk would turn up if someone were sifting through the ashes, but it was still better than tossing it all into the overflowing dumpster behind the building. The incinerator had been working for days and Elias hadn’t had any difficulty sneaking the Gruppenführer’s things in with all that was being burned: patient and hospital records, filthy bandages, old uniforms, and all sorts of things. It was a sure sign the end of the war was near. Armies always got to burning when things went south.

Elias turned left, his footsteps echoing in the tiled hall, and pushed the double doors open into a once wide hospital room now stuffed with thirty beds instead of the twelve it was meant to hold. This ward was used for burn patients, most of them either pilots or tankers, and it had been easy to sneak the Gruppenführer in here where nobody would question why he was covered in bandages or sedated. The ward reeked of infection and gangrene, as burn wards tended to. Burns always did get infected easily, especially now that bandage changes were few and far between by necessity and little else was available to stave off infection.

Elias sidled through the narrow walkway between the beds to the Gruppenführer’s.

He kept careful track of the time between doses of sedative with which he kept the Gruppenführer unconscious. He knew he should probably feel remorse for keeping stocks of this sedative hidden for his own purposes when there was so much suffering around him, but he found that the suffering of German soldiers didn’t bother him. He may have been a doctor, but he was also a Jew who had been raised in the clutches of a Nazi officer and who had seen first-hand what the Germans had done to his people. For a second, his eyes fell onto the man in the bed next to the Gruppenführer, a young pilot who’d lost both legs and had been badly burnt when his aircraft crashed. He was in obvious pain. Elias turned away and gave the Gruppenführer his next dose of the sedative.

Elias had just slipped the empty medication vial into his pocket when he heard running footsteps in the hallway. This was unusual, especially now that so few personnel were left, and Elias pushed his way to the doors with alarm. When he swung them open, he saw two orderlies running down the hallway to the stairs, in apparent panic, and disappearing from his view. He couldn’t immediately see what they were running from, but when he stepped out of the ward, he started hearing noise drawing closer. At first, the sounds were indistinct, then he realized that they were the sound of many boots running up and down the empty hospital corridors.

Just as Elias was within feet of the doors at the end of the hall, which led to the main stairwell, the doors flung violently open and in poured a small group of Russian soldiers who looked every bit as barbaric as they were depicted on the Nazi posters. There were six of them, all in brown-green uniforms and black boots. Some carried PPSh-41 submachine guns, others Nagant rifles. Two of them wore their plash-palatkas (rectangles of fabric that served as both raincoats and tents) like capes. As soon as they spotted Elias, they trained their weapons on him.

Elias didn’t know much Russian except what he’d learned as a military doctor, but what he knew included the only phrase he could remember at the moment: “NE STRELYAY!” Don’t shoot. He would have added, “I’m a doctor,” if he had known the words, but he hoped the white coat was enough of an indicator. Particularly, he hoped the fact he wasn’t wearing a uniform was enough to keep him from getting shot.

“Ne strelyay,” the first Russian imitated him in a mock effeminate voice and the others laughed. Elias wasn’t sure whether this was a good sign, but he figured if they were laughing, then at least they weren’t shooting. He allowed himself a bit of a smile, suggesting he was in on the joke, but feeling uneasy all the same.

The Russian soldiers drew closer and the first one simply pushed past him, as did the second, and went down the hallway, flinging doors open along the way to check the wards. The third soldier stopped and asked in surprisingly good German, “Where are the nurses?”

Elias blinked. “Sorry?”

“The nurses.” The Russian soldier suggested womanly curves with his hands to illustrate his point. “Women. Nurses. Nuns. Anything with tits. Where are they?”

Elias was taken aback. “There aren’t any. They’ve all been evacuated.”

The Russian yelled something in his own language to his comrades, which Elias assumed was along the lines of “There’s no pussy anywhere in this building.” The soldiers behind him looked disappointed. Then the German-speaking soldier turned back to Elias with a grin and said, “Okay. No tits. Maybe we’ll start with you, Doc.”

He slammed Elias roughly against the wall and grabbed his crotch, sending a wave of panic through the young doctor. Elias felt overwhelmed by a sense of dread and broke into a cold sweat. So this was how it ended, then … instead of revenge, he’d be raped and killed. The Russian’s face leaned closely into his own. Determined not to give in, Elias fixed his gaze on a random spot on the opposite wall and hoped whatever was going to happen would happen quickly.

The Russian broke into a smile. “You’re not really my type,” he said. In the background, gunfire erupted in another hallway, echoing loudly through the building, and Elias could hear the panic rising among the wounded men in the wards. His heart hammered in his chest.

“They’re just shooting the useless ones,” the Russian said. “Tell you what – find me a couple that aren’t burnt to a crisp to make my men happy. They’ve been dying for some R&R. I might just let you live yet. Is there any booze in the building?”

Elias’ mind raced. He might be able to escape death and still have his revenge on the Gruppenführer, but at the same time he realized both he and his prize were inches from death if he couldn’t in control the situation. If the Russians were shooting “the useless ones,” which Elias presumed meant any wounded who weren’t able to be used for sex or entertainment in some way, the sedated Gruppenführer would be among them. As would a certain doctor if he didn’t give them the answers they wanted.

He swallowed. “There’s some medicinal alcohol in the pharmacy. There may even be some booze left in the director’s office, I haven’t checked.” If he could find the Russians enough booze, they might leave him alone and he could sneak out of the facility with his prize, using one of the basement exits to get into the woods. (He wasn’t yet sure how to manage this with an unconscious man who was both larger and heavier than him.)

“Alright,” said the Russian. “Show me where to find that booze … and for your sake, let’s hope it’s there.”


	3. Chapter 3

As night fell over the hospital, Elias might have sworn he had descended straight into Dante’s Inferno.

The Russians, a group of roughly thirty men, had looted anything containing alcohol: medicinal Brandy, a few bottles of liquor abandoned in doctors’ offices, even rubbing alcohol. As the afternoon and the drinking wore on, they started building a large bonfire in the yard and systematically made their way through the hospital to round up any Germans who could walk under their own power and shoot those who couldn’t.

They had captured a small group of clerks and orderlies who hadn’t been able to hide or flee in time, and they also dragged out a few of the less seriously wounded. They herded them into the yard, stripped them naked, and paraded them around the fire. A young orderly with small, round glasses who seemed barely old enough to shave was pushed on his knees in front of a Russian soldier who had his trousers around his ankles and forced the German to suck his dick. When he was done, he passed the orderly to the next Russian, who shoved him into the fire. As his skin crackled and the acrid smell of burning flesh rose, the Russians laughed and carried on.

An older man, whom Elias remembered as having been assigned to the hospital because he as unfit for other duties, was used as a target. “Watch this,” a Russian laughed at Elias as he unloaded a full drum magazine from his PPSh into the man. Elias started into the flame, trying to shut out the screams of the Germans who were being murdered, as the Russians around him went on celebrating and killing.

Elias was happy to leave them to it as long as they left him alone. His only thought was that he needed to get back into the building to check on his Gruppenführer and make sure he was still alive. By now, the sedative would have worn off.

As it became later and the Russians’ celebration began to slow down, Elias felt safe to make his way to the hospital’s front doors, which gaped open at the top of the impressive marble staircase leading behind him. He decided to take the chance: first stepping a few steps backward at a time, then quietly making his way up the steps. He’d nearly made it to the doors when several Russians, wearing blood-stained hospital sheets like Roman togas, clattered across the entrance hall and made their way outside. Elias froze, hoping they hadn’t noticed him, and breathed a sigh of relief as they stumbled right past him, waving tins of sardines they had found in some long-forgotten back pantry corner. Elias slipped inside, sprinted down the corridor, and leapt up the back stairway two steps at a time.

Gasping for air, he reached the ward, flung open the door, and stepped into the semidarkness of the room, illuminated only by the flickering light from the bonfire below. The sight in front of him reminded him so much of the extermination camps, he couldn’t help but gasp in terror: most of the wounded had been shot or bayonetted to death in their beds. The floors were slick and the walls smeared with blood. Beds were overturned, mattresses flung aside. Some of the wounded still appeared to be alive, though likely not for much longer.

Elias stepped over the dead and dying and made his way to the end of the row, frantically searching for any sign of his prize. He cursed under his breath. Could the bastard have gotten away after all of this?

Elias started turning over some of the dead to get a closer look at their faces when he was suddenly startled by a voice so close behind him, it raised goosebumps all over his body. “Looking for something?”

He let out a startled squeak as the Russian grabbed him by the front of the shirt with one hand and slammed him against the wall, spilling some of the liquor from the half-empty bottle he was holding. He had a German officer’s pistol tucked in his waistband, but Elias didn’t dare reach for it. The Russian’s forearm dug into his throat, making breathing difficult. He could feel the blood pounding in his ears.

“Now then,” the Russian taunted. “What could a doctor be looking for up here? A special patient, perhaps? Or maybe our little party just isn’t to your taste.” He let go of Elias, pulled the pistol, and placed the barrel against Elias’ sternum. “Tell me: why shouldn’t I just shoot you?”

Elias’ legs were trembling. Despite all the death and destruction he’d seen first-hand, he wasn’t prepared to face his own before he could exact his revenge on the Gruppenführer. This one goal, which had seemed so close a few days earlier, now seemed out of his reach. He gave another shudder. Then, overwhelmed by the thought that this is how it all ended, he broke into hysterical laughter.

The Russian was taken aback. Perhaps he’d expected Elias to beg for his life, but he now doubted the doctor was even in his right mind. He took another swig from the bottle and put the pistol back into his waistband. “Do what you want,” he said, walking to the door. “Thanks for pointing me to the booze.”

When his footsteps had finally stopped echoing down the hallway, Elias’ shaking legs gave in and he sank to the floor, his heart still hammering, his body shaking. He couldn’t believe he was still alive. Hell, he couldn’t believe he didn’t piss himself. He even still had a chance to find his Gruppenführer, supposing he wasn’t dead.

Elias took deep breaths, trying to slow his breathing and heart rate, when he heard a faint but familiar voice speak his name from a corner of the room. His mind was still working slowly and it took him a minute to place the voice and connect it to a person, but he finally realized it belonged to the Gruppenführer.

Making his way across the room on unsteady legs, he found his prize hidden against the wall behind an overturned bed, bloodstained linens shielding him from view. He was alive, though still under the aftereffects of the sedative.

When he had disappeared out of the ward and his footsteps had stopped echoing down the hallway, Elias’ shaking legs gave in and he sank to the floor, his heart still tachycardic, his body shaking. He couldn’t believe he was still alive. Hell, he’d even manage not to piss himself. He even still had a chance to find the Gruppenführer, supposing he wasn’t dead already. Elias took deep breaths in and out, trying to slow both his breathing and his heart rate so he could get up and continue his search, when he heard a faint but familiar voice speak his name from the far corner of the room.

His mind was working slowly and it took him a minute to place the voice before he realized that it belonged to the Gruppenführer. Making his way across the room on unsteady legs, Elias found him hidden against the wall behind an overturned bed, bloodstained linens shielding him from view. He was alive, though still under the aftereffects of the sedative. Elias breathed a sigh of relief: he would have his revenge yet.

As the bonfire in the yard burnt to embers and the Russians settled down for the night, Elias tied the Gruppenführer’s hands, then half-carried, half-dragged him down the back stairway and into the basement, from where they would be able to escape into the woods. He knew his revenge was close at hand now, only a few dozen kilometers away in an abandoned cottage in the woods where nobody would ever think to look.

A smirk flashed across his face as they made their way into the trees. The Russians, whose idea of revenge was to kill and rape their way across Germany, had no idea of the sweet, perverse pleasure that came with true revenge of the kind Elias had planned for the Gruppenführer.


End file.
